Feb 2, 2021 12:30 EST Mass Effect Legendary Edition will launch on May 14th, as confirmed today by Electronic Arts. We also learned that this will not be a full remake, and BioWare consciously opted not to upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 technology, as that would have required remaking entire systems (such as dialogue trees). Speaking to IGN, Director Mac Walters explained that going with the full remake route with Mass Effect Legendary Edition could have lost some of the magic in the original. It very quickly became clear that level of jump would really change fundamentally what the series was; how it felt, how it played. A really crisp example of that would be if you look at the Kismit scripting language, it’s a visual scripting language from Unreal Engine 3, there’s no real copy-paste for that to go into Unreal Engine 4, meaning that every moment, every scene… everything would have had to essentially be redone from scratch. We knew at that point that we’d really sort of start to take away the essence and spirit of what the trilogy was.